The last 2 posts I made on my blog talk about the recent problems...

As far as the "no new posts for the past 60 minutes" just means the webpage displayed on your screen wasn't able to get the newest data for a whole hour so it "seemed" like nothing new was posted.

You can alternate tools like busy.org (which is a different layout that steemit, but uses the same steem blockchain)

Sometimes when steemit is slow, busy.org is faster.